Portmanteaux Bill Culbert, Kate Newby, Mateo Tannatt, Nick Austin, Pip Culbert
Bill Culbert
Central Station, 1991
metal lamp-stands, fluorescent tubes, electrical cable
ten elements, installation dimensions vary
Portmanteaux, 2014
installation view: Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland
Nick Austin
Atlas, 2014
acrylic on canvas
1300 x 1000mm
Mateo Tannatt
Sea Mass / Plaza 1, 2014
cast aluminum, dust motor, powder coated steel
460 x 710 x 450mm overall
Mateo Tannatt
left: Sea Mass / Plaza, 2014
cast and welded aluminium, powder coated steel
1110 x 710 x 450mm
right: Crowd Crown / Plaza 2, 2014
painted cast aluminum, stainless steel, powder coated steel
1110 x 710 x 450mm
Nick Austin
Harpoon, 2013
acrylic on canvas
700 x 500mm
Portmanteaux, 2014
installation view: Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland
Pip Culbert
Red, 2013
fabric, cotton
160 x 125mm
Portmanteaux, 2014
installation view: Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland
Pip Culbert
left: White, 2005
cotton
130 x 130mm
centre: Pinkish, 2002
cotton
140 x 130mm
right: White large, 2012
cotton
205 x 170mm
Nick Austin
Fallen Picture, 2013
acrylic on canvas
600 x 460mm
Kate Newby
Tuesday - Friday, 2014
silver, string
200 x 500 x 1000mm
Kate Newby
Legs. Legs., 2014
cast silver, bronze, ceramic
10 elements (yellow pebbles)
Portmanteaux
Nick Austin, Bill Culbert, Pip Culbert, Kate Newby, Mateo Tannatt
13 March – 5 April 2014
Auckland
“… the truth, namely, that form and content, veil and what is veiled, ‘the present’ and the pocket, were one.”
Hopkinson Mossman is pleased to present Portmanteaux, a group exhibition featuring recent paintings by Nick Austin, new sculpture by Kate Newby and Los Angeles-based artist Mateo Tannatt, fabric works by Pip Culbert, and a major light work by Bill Culbert.
Portmanteau is a term that describes two or more words or morphemes fused together to create a new word and meaning, and a particular type of suitcase with two compartments. For the exhibition at Hopkinson Mossman, the term is made plural and used for both its material and semiotic resonance.
The works in Portmanteaux share an interest in the potential emerging from simple, familiar forms. Pockets, envelopes, and mussel shells are used as containers or incubator’s of meaning, compressing questions around modes of distribution, the body, architecture, and the frame. Old lamp stands, clocks and calendars amplify a sense of transience and an interest in the acts of thinking. Taken together, the two registers set up a curiously slow and casual/causal back-and-forth between form and content, and suggest a capacity for objects to form, and act or participate in, their own networks of meaning.
quote: Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood Around 1900